The Official Fluid Blog

This post is co-authored by Art Director, Cat Lee.

We are proud to announce that Wag.com launched as the the 3rd installment to the Quidsi empire of brands. Very much like Diapers and Soap.com, one of our biggest challenges was to strike the balance between a boutique shopping experience with the convenience of a superstore. This positioning is unique to Quidsi and for the 3rd time, gave us a set of parameters to reach further and outdo ourselves in creating a fresh new experience.

Brand Experience

Making a digital brand from scratch is the type of project that we love to tackle. The challenges lie in materializing a brand into a personality where our audience would be able to fall in love with. We first cast a wide net of ideal shopping experiences and through a highly collaborative process, whittled it down to the core of your neighborhood pet store.

With it’s warm and friendly nature, the design shines through giving Wag a truly unique positioning that no other brand in the category can compare. The design values a homespun, whimsical and quirky flair, making it an ideal destination for our modern pet lovers. This is a place where we know how important your pet is to your family.

Close attention to detail was key in making the ordinary interactive elements bring forth the personality of Wag. The scalloped awning housing the global navigation was the perfect metaphor for the mom, pop, and pet storefront. To ensure the brand message carried through to the finest of details, we developed meticulous visual systems for the many working pieces of the site:

• Category color coding
• Typographic styling
• Banner treatments
• Photography selection

Last but not least, where would a brand be without it’s logo? The mark of Wag features a prominent logo type with a clever flicker of a happy tail. We custom designed the logo to not only stand alone as an individual entity but to represent the Quidsi family of brands.

Challenges & Innovations

One of the main challenges for the team was re-imagining the organization and hierarchy for a typical shopping site. Instead of designing an all inclusive navigational system for a single pet store, the Quidsi team pushed Fluid to think of Wag.com as six boutique pet stores within one super-store. In addition, we were challenged to support the shopping errand of a typical customer that owns a single pet.

This paradigm shift inspired Fluid to develop a two tiered organizational and navigational system. The top level navigation supports switching between ‘Pet Worlds’ while within a pet section an additional navigational system supports the shopping catalog for the selected fury friend.

In addition, the team had to rethink about the structure of a typical ecommerce home page experience. Instead of showcasing products and categories that speak to the entire super store, the team designed the home page to serve two main purposes:

• Provide customers with an immediate understanding of Wag’s value proposition of free shipping, excellent award winning customer service and a breadth of product offerings within multiple pet categories.
• Act as a spring board that allows customers to quickly and easily dive into a specific ‘Pet world’.

To support this pet focused shopping experience an in-context search menu was developed allowing customer’s to quickly and efficiently find products that are relevant to the pet category they are currently browsing. For example, while shopping in the Dog specific section of the site, the drop down menu within the search box is set to ‘Dog’ by default. A search for ‘bowl’ returns all bowl products that are specific for dogs. If the search results are too narrow for a customer, they can easily and quickly expand the search criteria by either selecting a different animal or all of Wag.com.

Finally, for those who want to spoil their loved ones or find that special gift; Fluid elegantly created a unique curated section called the ‘Pampered Pet Boutique’. This area of the site promotes specialized products in sets displayed in a beautiful editorial grid. Customers can easily browse the collections and purchase from a simple to use quick shop. And if these items don’t pique the customer’s interests, the full list of boutique items is at their disposal.

In short, this was another great opportunity to collaborate with our partners at Quidsi to push the envelope in terms of brand and user experience. A great challenge with great results.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 5:07 am and is filed under E-Commerce, Experience Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.